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All innovation starts with ideas. Sure, we talk about innovation
as disruptive, or global, or related to market moves, and
certainly spread over social media but the universal element of
all innovation is this: an idea.

And while I think most people like to think of themselves as
innovators or at the very least, able to drive innovation, I am
coming to question whether we are as qualified as we’d like to
be.

Now you might very well be offended by that idea. And if you are,
that only provides my point.

This is where my story begins. I just used the phrase “offended
by this idea.” And I did that on purpose. If you’re
rejecting, or shocked, or offended, or angered by an idea, you’re
probably not as good at innovation as you could be.

But don’t worry; taking offense is actually quite a normal human
response. New stuff is hard. Change is hard. And new ideas equal
change. Thus, ideas are hard.

Which is not to say, that we don’t already do innovation
well. We do! Human kind keeps plodding forward. Though we
have our setbacks—most of them caused by our own stupidity—you
have to admit that things are better than they were 10,000,
1,000, even 100 years ago. Heck, just think back to the dark ages
of 2001: there were no smart phones, no social media (twitter!),
no FailBlog, no Priuses, and Domino’s pizza sucked even more than
it does now…

But it’s my contention that we could be doing a LOT better,
moving a LOT faster, and driving MORE and BETTER innovation
within our organizations.

You see, I’ve come to question whether we’re actually any good at
taking in new ideas. I’ve already shared that I think we deny the
power of ideas by limiting WHO can have them and even to the
point of seeking permission from others about whether we’re
allowed to have ideas here in an earlier post called “Can Anyone Innovate?”.

Beyond the “who” should have ideas and the associated element of
conformity/permission, I’m wondering if we also limit “what”
ideas are valid, based on our bias. I question if we let new
ideas have power or if we guard against them.

Let me use history to illustrate this point. There was a time
when many thought that black people shouldn’t have equal rights
in this country, or questioned whether women should be allowed to
vote. In the same vein, there used to be a belief that smoking
made men looked macho, as demonstrated by Marlboro or in Egypt,
that the people in power were right to suppress their people;
otherwise, we risk peace. Each of those beliefs was once “true”
and then is no longer considered “a truth”. It most cases, it
took many, many years for that change to happen. And things
stayed the same in the broader culture until people could see the
new idea itself. Essentially, it took time to see something that
was already there, anew. Once we humans were able to accept a new
idea, then the social change happened.

This post is not about political correctness. It’s about how bias is built into our neurology. Quick
lesson in how the brain works: imagine it is the security guard
at your corporate headquarters. Lots of people flood in and
not every single pass can be checked. Who gets in first and
fastest? Those whom the guard has seen every day, for the last
five years. Familiarity is what the brain favors. The new and
strange has a tough time gaining entrance*.

Let me just summarize that a little more definitively: the way
our brain works means we actually guard against, and filter out,
and deny power to new ideas.

Our brains know how to essentially build a great echo chamber so
there’s harmony of ideas. And recently . Eli Pariser, has
been raising visibility to how and why Google and
Facebook have recently started to change what they present to any
person based on what they know about the person. It’s called a
filter bubble. If you have only clicked on
funny cat videos, and only interacted with 12 friends who all
vote like you do, your other friends who have a different range
of opinion on the political spectrum will no longer be presented
to you in FB. And similarly, your set of recommendations on
Google won’t include posts say, from the Atlantic or Economist.
Human have already had filters in the form of our brains and
those filters are now being automated. Or at least, Google and
FaceBook are taking the behavior you most demonstrate, and
maximizing that.

Suddenly, you are thus even less likely to be exposed to
something novel, unexpected, or uncomfortable. While humans are
already incredibly capable of setting up those mental Guards to
not let any new ideas in, we’ve now got help in the form of
automating our echo chambers. (Note to Google: I am not excited
by this “help…”)

This human bias -- our preferences, passions, and love -- for
familiarity leaves us idea blind: we are unable or unwilling to
see ideas when it does not come from sources that are familiar to
us….

Perhaps in who delivers the idea; do they look like us,

Perhaps in education levels: do they sound like us,

And especially, in ideology, that they think like us.

And at any particular moment, it feels fine. There is no
immediate consequence because of this guard at the door.

It just doesn’t work very well for innovation and for the long
run of competitiveness.

The idea that a black person can vote has certainly shifted. But
for many years, the mass majority of Americans could not see past
our own biases. Today, women board of director positions account
for about 10% of the seats, and yet represent about 60% of all
buying decisions. Corporate board and top executive gender
inequity might just be our modern day issue of bias, at play.

So, as we think about whether each of us denies power to new
ideas, let me just ask you the question on a practical level …
how would you be more open to me if I represented the new idea? I
am a brown, opinionated woman, not educated in the big ivy
leagues but worked my way through education starting with a
2-year community college, and I don’t have a big organization
that my personal brand is currently associated with …. Just think
about how none of those things fit within what you look for to
prove to yourself this person is worth paying attention to… Pause
for a second as you take that in…. Would you be open to me? Would
you follow me on twitter? Would you include me in your Follow
Friday recommendations? Likely not. But maybe I’m being biased.

My own experience is this. Quite often when people first hear me
talk, they spend the first few minutes trying to figure why I
lack any Indian accent. They don’t mean to do it; they just do.
You see, I don’t fit a bucket they’ve ever seen (most speakers on
stage look nothing like me) and I don’t
talk on expected ideas, or the flavors of the day. Any audience
of mine likely has to work that much harder to even consider my
ideas … to get past those security guards that don’t know what to
do with…newness.

When we are biased (which the neurology says we all are), we are
actually trapped in place, stuck in our own initial spot from
which we started.

And this only gets worse the more advanced we are in our careers…
As our careers progress, we often get caught into knowing more of
what we already know. It is like following the rabbit down the
hole in the Alice in Wonderland metaphor -- we keep going
and going deeper into the depth of our domain.

But that means we simply could miss the interdisciplinary
evolution of ideas or the ways in which the world could become
topsy turvy.

Research done by the best firms including Frog and Tim Brown’s
IDEO
have shown us that most innovations emerge when different
intellectual disciplines collide – those things that are beyond
each of our own domain… so my question to you – to all of us --
is …this:

How do we enable innovation? How do we get past that part
of our brain that shuts down or denies power to new
ideas?

How do we have ways to explore the edges of possibilities that
surround each of us?

To start, maybe we should listen and select more to more
divergent ideas online, so that we are more likely to at least
consider divergent ideas. Rather than just checking HuffPo or
NYT, maybe we also pay attention to Al-Jazeera?

Perhaps at work, we could enable our teams to have debates
regularly at meetings, to share the Why and the Why Not? Perhaps, then, we’ll hear
more contrary points of view. In media options, if we normally
only subscribe to People, maybe we ought to pick up the Economist at the
doctor’s office?

In conference choices, if we are subject matter experts and only
go to say, tech or medical conferences, maybe we ought to spend
some time at interdisciplinary events like TED or PopTECH? As you know
I already think going to TED is worthwhile…

Maybe we ought to tune out the cat videos which satisfice the
lizard brain but not the fuller reflective side of who we are?

Maybe we ought to hold new ideas in a kind of holding area
where we can consider it, rather than tossing it out. Big ideas deserve to inform us and shape us. How
about we invite them in and let them stay a while, before we
decide if they can influence us.

This ultimately does pay out. Innovation is all
about the new perspective and new idea. If we are to change what
we create and enable the interdisciplinary view of the world, we
need to be open to changing who we are, and what we believe, by
what ideas we allow to influence us. The ideas that we allow in,
informs our perspective, which informs our ability to create and
out innovate others.

That means we need to think about and figure out what we allow to
surround us.

How else could we allow, rather than deny, Power to Ideas?

<Please add your own ideas in the comments section.>

(*Many thanks to @M_Heffernan for that common-sense explanation.
She’s got an interesting new book out on blindness worth
reading.)